NSA spied on Copenhagen UN climate summit – Snowden leak

Executive-Secretary of the UN Climate Conference, Yvo de Boer (L) and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon attend the plenary session at the Bella Center of Copenhagen on December 19, 2009 at the end of the COP15 UN Climate Change Conference. (AFP Photo / Olivier Morin) / AFP

The US National Security Agency spied on the communications conducted by other governments before and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations conference held in Copenhagen, according to a report based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

A “top secret” document published by the Huffington Post this
week reveals that the NSA was keeping tabs on how other countries
were communicating before the conference and that the
intelligence agency planned to keep its operations running
through the meeting.

The document was published on an internal NSA site on the first
day of the Denmark conference, December 7, 2009, and stated that
“analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners,
will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and
valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for
the conference, as well as the deliberation within countries on
climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

The mention of “Second Party partners” is a reference to the Five
Eyes group of nations that the US shares intelligence with, a
group that includes the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and
New Zealand.

The Huffington Post reported on the documents Wednesday evening
in conjunction with Information, a Danish daily newspaper that
also worked with journalist Laura Poitras. The document clearly
shows that the NSA sought to gain collect intelligence on
negotiating parties’ private meetings throughout the summit.

Nearly 200 countries participated in the 15th Conference of the
Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change. The two-week summit was the first of US President Obama’s
administration and was expected to end in a major breakthrough
regarding the impact of rising greenhouse gas emissions. This
meeting was supposed to end in an agreement between the US,
China, India, and others with quickly growing emissions on a plan
to curb their contribution to climate change.

“While the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate change
Conference remains uncertain, signals intelligence will
undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as
well informed as possible throughout the 2-week event,” the
document states.

“[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will
undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy
formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar
discussions with their counterparts – details of which are of
great interest to our policymakers,” the document states
before noting that the information would then likely be used to
brief top American officials including President Obama and
then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

While the document did not include any mention of how the
surveillance was conducted, members of the Danish negotiation
team did tell Information that US and Chinese delegations were
“peculiarly well-informed” about closed-door discussions.

“They simply sat back, just as we had feared they would if
they knew about our document,” one source said. “They
made no constructive statements. Obviously, if they had known
about our plans since the fall of 2009, it was in their interest
to simply wait for our draft proposal to be brought to the table
at the summit…I was often completely taken aback by what they
knew.”